Intel has showed a prototype smartphone based on its low-power Medfield processor and said Intel-based phones from "major players" would be in the market next year. Intel has struggled to get its chips into smartphones and tablets, markets that are dominated today by processor designs from Intel's U.K. rival ARM Holdings.

Microsoft doesn't care much about the kernel either, because it's all abstracted by .net runtime. Of course they want to sell WP7 licenses, but what kernel is underneath doesn't really matter. They could sell "WP8" with Linux kernel if it appeared convenient, the layer that has all the value in the platform is silverlight.

I really don't believe that for one moment.

If that was the case then MS would have done so with WP7 rather than rewriting much of Win CE code base. Or they wouldn't have spend the last 8 years cleaning up the NT kernel.

MS have always cared about owning the complete software stack from the kernel through to web apps.